I am an adjunct physics instructor teaching at a community college. I have
been trying to get the full time faculty to add computer simulations to
their lab courses and computer programming to their homework assignments.
The lab simulations need not replace the physical lab but could supplement
the existing lab by pre (or post) showing the students how typical results
"should" turn out. Another use of the simulation would be to indicate the
effect of factors which would be impractical to demonstrate in the physical
lab (e.g. air resistance, fall off of gravity with distance from the earth,
averaging of random errors as the number of measurements becomes large,
etc.). An example of a computer homework problem would be the
"Skateboarders rock at physics" problem discussed in the latest Science
News, 12/3/11, p10. Here students are given the choice of skateboarding
down either a shorter incline angling down modestly but without changing
slope (Case a) compared with a relatively longer incline angling steeply
downward in two sections (Case b). The article claims that Case b is the
correct choice and is the intuitive choice of students who skateboard. This
problem can be solved with basic freshman/sophomore physics (algebra based).
When I did this and implemented the solution in a simple Excel program, I
found that for certain ranges of parameters (relative steepness of the
slopes and relative lengths and heights of the inclined sections) Case a
would actually be the better choice while for other parameter choices Case b
was, in fact, better. Such a problem is solvable with elementary physics
equations but is onerous to compute for the wide range of parameters needed
to completely span the solutions. Seeing how the solutions vary with
parameter choices and then trying to physically understand the behavior
seems to me highly worthwhile and not feasible with a few hand calculations.
Assigning a few such problems, over the semester, as homework (or even a
full lab session ) seems worthwhile to me.
While the full time instructors acknowledge that such computer
simulations/homework may be useful, they maintain that such work
(particularly, the lab simulations) belongs in junior/senior year level
courses and the freshman/sophomore courses we exclusively teach (as a
community college) should only contain real physical measurements. I feel
that, at least, a small portion of our labs and homework should involve
computer simulations and programming. I've seen at what a young
(pre-school) age my grandchildren are becoming computer literate. I think
our modern freshmen and sophomores are easily up to using (and, perhaps,
even writing) lab simulations and certainly writing simple Excel programs to
solve problems like the skateboarding problem.
I feel our graduating sophomores may be behind their peers at other
institutions who have already started down the computer simulations/homework
path, but I don't have any data on what other institutions (either 2 year or
4 year ) are doing.
I'd appreciate your inputs on your experiences on either using such
simulations/homework in freshman/sophomore courses or why you have not done
so.